It’s a cold wet morning and we’ve met at Shoreditch Grind for a hit of caffeine to fuel our journey to Belgium. The main topic of conversation is Friday night’s show at The London Forum. In short, It blew our minds! We couldn’t have hoped for a better night. We’ve toured our first album extensively and one concern, aside from the one of “are they going to like the new material”, was that maybe people had seen enough of us already and maybe we’d be playing to half empty rooms, especially as venue sizes on this tour were the biggest so far. It was perhaps a little over ambitious? Our fears however were unfounded as the Forum was packed to the rafters with beautiful people supporting us every step of the way and singing along even louder than we were. It really was a special night for us and we thank you all for making it one to remember.
So, in the time it’s taken me to write the last paragraph, we’ve travelled to Folkstone and are now about to board a train resembling a giant Rimowa suitcase which will hurtle through a tunnel underneath the sea and pop out in France from where we will continue driving to Middlekerke in Belgium. Due to rapid advances in technology, we no longer have a printed tour book but an app on our phones called Master Tour. This tells us where we’ll be on what day, what hotel we’ll be staying in and other vital information like how long the drives are. We obviously never read this and repeatedly ask Iain Graham questions such as “where is the hotel” or “how long is the drive to Zurich?” Which is either ignored or elicits the standard, blunt response… “Master Tour!”. I have just consulted this digital world of information (surprisingly, there is 4g under the English Channel) and it appears that there’ll be a fair bit of driving on this little tour. As you probably know, we are no strangers to marathon drives followed by a soundcheck and a show but this style of touring leaves no margin for error and with our track record of flat tyres and faulty splitter vans, we’ll be crossing our fingers that each show is reached without the help of roadside assistance.
So, after Friday’s epic night, we embark on yet another jaunt around Europe with next year’s marathon U.S. Tour looming closer by the day. The feeling in the Temperance Movement camp however is not that we are approaching the end of a long period of touring, but that this is just the beginning of a whole new chapter.
– Nick
